Hunted Projects is pleased to present Black Pearl, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Edinburgh based artist Elaine Speirs. The exhibition brings together a body of work centred on the flower - not as decorative subject, but as a vessel for exploring presence, emotion, and the human condition.

At its heart is the exhibition's title work, Black Pearl, a monumental painting measuring 240cm x 106cm - the largest and most ambitious canvas Speirs has produced to date. Where her smaller paintings hold the bloom in intimate, contained space, here the flower expands to fill a wall, its scale transforming quiet observation into something closer to confrontation. The painting anchors the exhibition, announcing a new physical and ambitious register for a body of work that has, until now, unfolded at a more restrained size.

Speirs' world is beautiful, ethereal, and elegant, yet beneath its romantic sweeps of colour lies a resilient energy. Her flowers are not simply objects of aesthetic pleasure - they hold a fierce sense of purpose and vitality. Sweet pinks and golden yellows sit against intense purples and blacks, and through this rich palette and instinctive brushwork, the surface of each painting is alive with movement.

In these recent floral works, the bloom is both subject and cipher - offered, but never passively. Rendered in layers that blur the line between figuration and abstraction, the paintings carry an inner vitality emerging from the quiet privacy of the studio into full chromatic force. They continue a lineage of artists who have used the flower to explore presence and beauty, from Renoir's soft, luminous still lifes to Monet's water lilies, though Speirs arrives at this company through her own mark-making rather than imitation.

"I use solid colour surfaces and a fluorescent background to support the muted colours that attract me when selecting the flowers I paint," Speirs says. "My flower paintings place you at the centre of an ongoing narrative that feels familiar and alien... the echoes of painters Berthe Morisot and Joan Mitchell accompany me."

Her palette is instinctive and emotionally charged, favouring painterly gesture over botanical accuracy. Paint drips, stains, and settles, building a visual language that feels both improvised and intentional. In Black Pearl, this instinct is given room to breathe at scale - fragility and strength held in balance, a single bloom transposed into something monumental, and a series announcing its own expansion.